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Orthographic influence on phonological categorization: The alveolar tap as liquid or stop
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Tarleton Hill1, Arild Hestvik1; 1University of Delaware
Introduction: Although most of the world population is now literate, and most second-language learners acquire their L2 partially through written media, the role of orthographic knowledge in phonological processing is understudied. Along with other top-down effects such as visual articulatory cues (McGurk Effect), lexical knowledge (Ganong Effect), and semantic context, our mental representation of how words are written could influence how we perceive and categorize sounds. The alveolar tap [ɾ] patterns with different phonological categories depending on language. In many languages, it patterns phonologically as a liquid and is represented orthographically by the grapheme <r>. However, in North American English, it exists only as an allophone of /t/ and /d/, so it is underlyingly a stop, while the postalveolar approximant [ɹ] is represented by <r>. English speakers often pronounce L2 /ɾ/ as [ɹ] when learning /ɾ/=<r> languages like Spanish, even though [ɾ] does exist in English. One potential explanation for this is that the orthography of each language modulates the mapping between speech sound and underlying phoneme. Method: This EEG study will evaluate whether orthographic knowledge can modulate whether English-speakers categorize [ɾ] as an allophone of /d/ or /ɹ/. Two groups of subjects will conduct a word-learning task in which they are presented with pictures of novel objects, each accompanied by an audio clip of a pseudo-word containing intervocalic [ɾ] and a written transcription representing the [ɾ] as either <dd> (Group D) or <r> (Group R), e.g. <foddy> or <fari> for the same phonetic signal [faɾi]. They will then undergo a passive EEG recording, during which they are presented with oddball sequences contrasting [d] with [ɾ], [ɹ] with [ɾ], and, as a control, [d] with [ɹ]. Results: Larger MMNs are expected when contrasts are between-category (phonemic) rather than within-category (purely phonetic). Therefore, both groups are predicted to exhibit an MMN given a [d]/[ɹ] contrast, since these are distinct phonemes in English. Group D is expected to exhibit a similar MMN with the [ɹ]/[ɾ] contrast, but an attenuated, phonetic-contrast-only MMN when the contrast is standard [d] with [ɾ], since the learning task strengthens their existing mapping of [ɾ] as an allophone of /d/. In other words, for Group D, the former is a between-categories contrast (both phonetic and phonemic contrast), and the latter a within-category phonetic contrast only. Group R is expected to exhibit the opposite results, with an MMN for the [d]/[ɾ] contrast and a weaker MMN for the [ɹ]/[ɾ] contrast. Discussion: This study is currently in pilot testing, and preliminary results will be available before September. We predict main effects of group (<r> vs <d> in trained orthography) and contrast ([d]/[ɾ], [ɹ]/[ɾ], [d]/[ɹ]), and significant interaction between group and contrast, as noted above. A significantly stronger MMN for Group R on the [d]/[ɾ] contrast supports the argument that subjects have temporarily mapped [ɾ] as a rhotic despite its exclusive occurrence as a stop allophone in North American English, If these results are borne out by the experiment, the interaction pattern can only be attributable to the learned orthography-phoneme mappings.
Topic Areas: Phonology, Speech Perception